Your Chemistry Hometown!

If you love chemistry like me, you probably want to learn as much about it as you can. Fortunately, this site has plenty of tutorials, practice problems, textbooks, chili recipes, and YouTube silliness to keep you entertained. Of course, I’ll keep working on this site and help it to make it even more amazing, so check back from time to time and see what’s new.

Also, for a limited time only, I will be giving a pony to everybody who tells a friend or teacher about this website*. It may be a free website, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want everybody to learn chemistry!

OK.

Ian Guch

10/10/17

*Offer not valid in Alaska and Hawaii, anywhere else in the United States or its territories, in countries that belong to either the British Commonweath or United Nations, the planet Earth, or anybody containing any human DNA at all.

Thanks! (The weather is getting colder and a bowl of Mr. Guch’s Chili sounds awfully good.) I have used worksheets from your website for years and sent my students there for additional practice as well. Thanks for all of it!

I have been a Mister Guch fan since ’98! I have been teaching jr high science for over ten years and chemfiesta has been in my lesson plans since the day I found it. From my first oil spill lab to buying your “For Dummies” tome, it’s been a grand ride! Thank you so much.

Dear Mr. Guch
I am a student taking chemistry at a not so local high school and in my frantic scrambling to pass tomorrows test, I have stumbled across this gem of a website. Seeing your chili recipe and your nitric acid story has truly made my day and inspired me. Please keep up the great work for your students with my thanks in mind. With luck I’ll pass another test tomorrow. Just kidding. My teacher is ruthless. Ily

Thanks so much for spreading the love with these resources. I’ve just discovered your website and think it’s great. Your advice to kids, parents and teachers is spot on. Thanks too for the heads up about the Fugazi demo (in your blog). Who said Chemistry teachers are nerds?

I have been struggling with trying to figure out the rationale behind how to correctly use the roman numerals when naming a compound all semester. Tonight I found this website on a practice exam we were given in class and in literally 5 minutes I had mastered the process. The way you present the “how to” step by step process helped me tremendously. I can’t thank you enough! Just call me ‘grateful college girl’

I am trying to cobble together a chemistry class for my homeschool son. Starting Grade 10. I love your site, can you recommend a good text book or other primary source to be used along with it? Thanks in advance.

Wow! What an amazing site. I, too, would love to know your recommendations for a homeschooling curriculum in chemistry. You obviously know your science, but even better you appear to ENJOY it. Any suggestions you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Hello, I have used ‘Six Steps to Wonderful Graphs’ in the past in my class room with great success. I can no longer access it, but was redirected to this site. Do you still have this as an active link? If so, I would greatly appreciate it if you could help me locate it. Thanks very much.

If you’re interested in adding an alternative vegetarian chili recipe, I can recommend one that’s first-rate based on a sampling of two: your Mom and Dad.
BTW, the web site keeps getting better and better — particularly since (young) Steve has been getting involved.

Thank you for providing all of these valuable resources and for being one of my top “go to” spots for Chemistry! I’ve been “with” you since my first year of teaching 15 years ago. You’ll stick around for at least another 15 until I retire, right?

Thank you so much for all you do on this website! You saved my butt so many times during my first year teaching a high school chemistry! Now I am in my third year and it will be in Sweden. You have given a good base to work from and making it interesting and fun!

You’re not serious about your gas stoichiometric question on water are you?
Step 7: Switching gears to gases
Now that we’ve done some moles-grams stuff, you’ll notice that our next step is to convert from moles of water vapor to liters of water vapor. This is done using our friend PV = nRT, or in the case of gases at STP, 22.4 L/mol.
In this example we’re at STP, so we’ll just continue the calculation above using “22.4 L” as our conversion factor:
Water is NOT a gas at STP, and your quantity of water has a volume of approx. 20mL. at STP., except maybe on Venus or Mercury..

Hi. I’m glad you pointed this out to me because it’s a perfect example of how two important things:
1) I can screw up like anybody else.
2) The best way to fix problems is to get the input of others.
I will, by the end of the afternoon, make sure that the problem you mentioned is fixed. I would also like to encourage you (and anybody else reading this) to please let me know when there are mistakes on the site. It’s only through comments like yours that I know there’s a problem.

I just wanted to say thanks. Big thanks. My co-teacher and I had to build an 8th grade (high school credit) chemistry and physics class from scratch. We leaned heavily on your materials for our students, and you deserve the virtual high five. Thanks!

As a first-year Chem teacher, I seriously can’t thank you enough for making this bounty of resources freely available. Your site is my go-to for student practice work on days that I’m unexpectedly sick and need to get something to my sub ASAP.

I never realized until now that I was able to actually leave you a comment! I just wanted to say thank you so very much for taking the time to build this beautiful repository of chemistry help! In highschool (7 years ago now…wow!) I took AP chemistry and it was thanks to you that I learned how to balance equations! Fast forward to now, I have graduated with a BSc. Honors in Chemistry from Concordia University in Montreal, and I am currently pursuing my MSc. in Chemistry! I truly feel that I owe a lot of my success to you, you are one of my chem-heroes!

I have also been TA-ing general chemistry for three years now, and I have referred well over two thousand students to your website. Does this mean I get an entire island of ponies? haha!

Thank you for all of your resources. I found a mistake on your answer key to Balancing Equations Worksheet, Part 2. Ques 12 is balanced and question 14 has coefficients of 2,3,3,1. Please email me if I am incorrect. berghmary@yahoo.com. Thanks again.

Copyright information

The resources on this site were written between 1998 and 2017 by Ian Guch and are copyrighted. You may use these resources subject to the the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC 4.0). For more information about this license and how it affects how you can use the contents of this site, visit http://creativecommons.org .

Disclaimer

The disclaimer is simple: If you use anything on this site or linked to from this site, do so at your own risk. Though everything should be awesome, I take no responsibility for physical, mental, moral, or metaphysical injuries and the consequences thereof. OR put another way, if you blow yourself up, don't blame me.

Projects we sponsor

We here at the Cavalcade o' Chemistry regularly donate to the Free Software Foundation and the Wikimedia Foundation. I also donate to the Linux Mint project and toward hosting Puppy Linux whenever I remember. If you've got a few extra bucks lying around, why not donate it toward a cause that you believe in, too?

A recommendation

If you haven't seen that TV show Metalocalypse, you really should. My wife says that I remind her of Pickles the drummer, which isn't much of an endorsement. At least she didn't say I reminded her of William Murderface, though.